Broken IDE interface?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Albright.Brian
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Albright.Brian

Please don't respond unless you've read it all.


A couple weeks ago I decided to put together a computer out of some
old parts I had from previous cannibalized builds. Basically I had an
old Pentium D system without hard drives, and 2 old IDE hard drives
doing nothing. Naturally, I put them together. Upon boot up, the
computer recognized the IDE cd-rom, but neither of the hard drives (as
in, no hard drives detected). I opened up the case, checked the
jumpers, and also tried to boot up each drive individually as master.
Nothing worked. I then switched ports with the CD rom. Now the CD-
rom is seen on the other interface, but the hard drives are still not
seen. Swapped IDE cables and same problem. I then reset the bios in
a last ditch effort, to no avail. I have not tried the SATA
interfaces.

After all this, I decided the drives must both be bad. Wrong again.
I bought an external enclosure to test them, and they both work fine.

Question is this. Can the IDE interface go out? Can I physically
repair the motherboard if a cap blew out or something? Any other
ideas? The computer worked fine when I took it apart last year.
 
Please don't respond unless you've read it all.


A couple weeks ago I decided to put together a computer out of some
old parts I had from previous cannibalized builds. Basically I had an
old Pentium D system without hard drives, and 2 old IDE hard drives
doing nothing. Naturally, I put them together. Upon boot up, the
computer recognized the IDE cd-rom, but neither of the hard drives (as
in, no hard drives detected). I opened up the case, checked the
jumpers, and also tried to boot up each drive individually as master.
Nothing worked. I then switched ports with the CD rom. Now the CD-
rom is seen on the other interface, but the hard drives are still not
seen. Swapped IDE cables and same problem. I then reset the bios in
a last ditch effort, to no avail. I have not tried the SATA
interfaces.

After all this, I decided the drives must both be bad. Wrong again.
I bought an external enclosure to test them, and they both work fine.

Question is this. Can the IDE interface go out? Can I physically
repair the motherboard if a cap blew out or something? Any other
ideas? The computer worked fine when I took it apart last year.
Click to expand...
You`ve tried the CD rom on each IDE, and it works OK
So the IDEs are OK.
Plug 1 HD on, and go into the BIOS at startup.
See if the HD can be auto found.
Repeat for other HD.
Is the BIOS battery OK ?.

If the machine has a floppy drive, see if you can bootup
to DOS.
 
Please don't respond unless you've read it all.


A couple weeks ago I decided to put together a computer out of some
old parts I had from previous cannibalized builds. Basically I had an
old Pentium D system without hard drives, and 2 old IDE hard drives
doing nothing. Naturally, I put them together. Upon boot up, the
computer recognized the IDE cd-rom, but neither of the hard drives (as
in, no hard drives detected). I opened up the case, checked the
jumpers, and also tried to boot up each drive individually as master.
Nothing worked. I then switched ports with the CD rom. Now the CD-
rom is seen on the other interface, but the hard drives are still not
seen. Swapped IDE cables and same problem. I then reset the bios in
a last ditch effort, to no avail. I have not tried the SATA
interfaces.

After all this, I decided the drives must both be bad. Wrong again.
I bought an external enclosure to test them, and they both work fine.

Question is this. Can the IDE interface go out? Can I physically
repair the motherboard if a cap blew out or something? Any other
ideas? The computer worked fine when I took it apart last year.
Click to expand...

check the cmos settings for your IDE and SATA, even if you 'reset' the MOS defaults maybe
not the settings you want
 
Please don't respond unless you've read it all.


A couple weeks ago I decided to put together a computer out of some
old parts I had from previous cannibalized builds. Basically I had an
old Pentium D system without hard drives, and 2 old IDE hard drives
doing nothing. Naturally, I put them together. Upon boot up, the
computer recognized the IDE cd-rom, but neither of the hard drives (as
in, no hard drives detected). I opened up the case, checked the
jumpers, and also tried to boot up each drive individually as master.
Nothing worked. I then switched ports with the CD rom. Now the CD-
rom is seen on the other interface, but the hard drives are still not
seen. Swapped IDE cables and same problem. I then reset the bios in
a last ditch effort, to no avail. I have not tried the SATA
interfaces.

After all this, I decided the drives must both be bad. Wrong again.
I bought an external enclosure to test them, and they both work fine.

Question is this. Can the IDE interface go out? Can I physically
repair the motherboard if a cap blew out or something? Any other
ideas? The computer worked fine when I took it apart last year.
Click to expand...

what's on the hard drives................does one have an OS.
 
The hard drives are formatted NTFS.

I have tried booting each drive individually, set as master, to no
avail.

When I first tried, the settings hadn't changed from the last time it
had worked on the cmos. I looked around inside the bios for settings,
and couldn't find anything that was really wrong or out of place.
Maybe it is the power supply...
 
The hard drives are formatted NTFS.

I have tried booting each drive individually, set as master, to no
avail.

When I first tried, the settings hadn't changed from the last time it
had worked on the cmos. I looked around inside the bios for settings,
and couldn't find anything that was really wrong or out of place.
Maybe it is the power supply...
Click to expand...
Are the drives spinning when power is applied??? If they were setting
a long time and are not spinning, the heads might be stuck to the disks.
There is a way of freeing up the disks if this is your problem.
 
Ken said:
Are the drives spinning when power is applied??? If they were setting a
long time and are not spinning, the heads might be stuck to the disks.
There is a way of freeing up the disks if this is your problem.
Click to expand...

he has said they ran up in an external drive.............
 
Yes said:
he has said they ran up in an external drive.............
Click to expand...

I like the power supply idea. It is at least worth checking the +5V and
+12V voltages, to see if they are the source of the problem.

If the CDROM really works on the IDE cable, then that might mean
the IDE part is OK. If nothing works on the IDE cable, it would be
a different story, and then it might be motherboard swapout time.

A good test for the CDROM, would be booting an installer CD or a
live Linux distro.

Paul
 
Please don't respond unless you've read it all.


A couple weeks ago I decided to put together a computer out of some
old parts I had from previous cannibalized builds. Basically I had an
old Pentium D system without hard drives, and 2 old IDE hard drives
doing nothing. Naturally, I put them together. Upon boot up, the
computer recognized the IDE cd-rom, but neither of the hard drives (as
in, no hard drives detected). I opened up the case, checked the
jumpers, and also tried to boot up each drive individually as master.
Nothing worked. I then switched ports with the CD rom. Now the CD-
rom is seen on the other interface, but the hard drives are still not
seen. Swapped IDE cables and same problem. I then reset the bios in
a last ditch effort, to no avail. I have not tried the SATA
interfaces.

After all this, I decided the drives must both be bad. Wrong again.
I bought an external enclosure to test them, and they both work fine.

Question is this. Can the IDE interface go out? Can I physically
repair the motherboard if a cap blew out or something? Any other
ideas? The computer worked fine when I took it apart last year.
Click to expand...

Could it be that one of the interface signals is strong enough to work
with the CDROM but not with either of the two hard drives?

Try booting with a DOS boot disk or Win9x startup diskette. Make sure
it has CDROM support, ie a CDROM driver and MSCDEX.EXE. Then access
the CDROM by typing ...

dir d:\ /s /p

.... where d: is the drive letter of the CDROM.

Keep a note of any misspelt filenames. This will tell you if there is
a problem with a particular data bit.

- Franc Zabkar
 
Could it be that one of the interface signals is strong enough to work
with the CDROM but not with either of the two hard drives?

Try booting with a DOS boot disk or Win9x startup diskette. Make sure
it has CDROM support, ie a CDROM driver and MSCDEX.EXE. Then access
the CDROM by typing ...

dir d:\ /s /p

... where d: is the drive letter of the CDROM.

Keep a note of any misspelt filenames. This will tell you if there is
a problem with a particular data bit.

- Franc Zabkar
Click to expand...

Could you test the HDDs in another machine?
 
Please don't respond unless you've read it all.

A couple weeks ago I decided to put together a computer out of some
old parts I had from previous cannibalized builds. Basically I had an
old Pentium D system without hard drives, and 2 old IDE hard drives
doing nothing. Naturally, I put them together. Upon boot up, the
computer recognized the IDE cd-rom, but neither of the hard drives (as
in, no hard drives detected). I opened up the case, checked the
jumpers, and also tried to boot up each drive individually as master.
Nothing worked. I then switched ports with the CD rom. Now the CD-
rom is seen on the other interface, but the hard drives are still not
seen. Swapped IDE cables and same problem. I then reset the bios in
a last ditch effort, to no avail. I have not tried the SATA
interfaces.

After all this, I decided the drives must both be bad. Wrong again.
I bought an external enclosure to test them, and they both work fine.

Question is this. Can the IDE interface go out? Can I physically
repair the motherboard if a cap blew out or something? Any other
ideas? The computer worked fine when I took it apart last year.
Click to expand...

Depends on how old the hardrive is, but they type of IDE cable you use
is very important. There are 40 wire cables and 80 wire cables. The
Newer IDE drives require 80 Pin cables. If both cables are side by
side, it is easy to determine which is 80 wire and which is 40. Also,
as far as I know, all IDE cdroms and dvd roms do not require 80 wire
cables only the IDE hardrives. This leads me to beleive you have a old
IDE 40 wire cable attached to a newer IDE hardrive.

Hope this helps.
 
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